Just another WordPress.com site

Monthly Archives: September 2013

I’m a native English speaker but there are days when nothing but the verb is coherent in other people’s sentences. Even when I was in high school, I didn’t really like using super new slang when I talked. It wasn’t that I was resisting being like everyone else. My desire when I tried to communicate was that no one needed a secret code book to understand what I was trying to say.

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Now with the online games/hackers who use L33t speak, pop culture, and texting shortcuts, I’m screwed because I don’t have the same lexicon as everyone else it seems. For example, I posted on my Facebook page about how my wireless cut out but I was still listening to Pandora. Someone wrote the comments, “Buffering FTW!”

I stared at in and thought, are they dyslectic because I know WTF, mate but that is not appropriate for a response. (see if somehow I’m slightly more hip that you & you haven’t seen it yet)

Seriously, an acronym for 9 letters and 2 spaces? Are people wanted to be misunderstood? That’s why I am always on the look out for a better word to use that fits like the last puzzle piece when I talk. Maybe I’m retro in how I talk and but the meaning of word you can’t understand in my sentence, can be found in the dictionary and not some vague cultural reference that only the few plugged in people will get.

I guess my quest for a better word will leave me with a constant I-think-that-was-English face when speaking to those who don’t want to enrich their vocabulary with words that actually exist.

Seven years ago I decided that I had a story burning up inside me that I needed to get out. So I wrote over 100 pages and went to get feedback.

It wasn’t pretty.

So I decided to take a writing course. That helped shape me up. I rewrote the story, got stuck, so write an entirely different novel, applying all the good notes I received from my course. I used said without fear, made sure the character’s scenes were conflict motivated, beefed up my setting description but not over doing it.

This time when I handed my manuscript to beta readers, I got more line-by-line tweaks since I had improved my basic building blocks of writing a compelling story. Now that I am starting to feel good again about my abilities as a writer I read a blog and now I question my sentence structure. Am I varying them enough? Am I boring the readers?

Even though I’m submitting my work to agents to get this book published, should I stop and rework the entire thing, for the 12th time? I know that each time I work on the manuscript it is getting better but when can I just let it go? When will I stop working over the same material but from different angles?

My guess is once this is goes to print. *sigh* That seems like that is so far away. At least, I don’t feel sick of working on it but I sure wish I could stop feeling self conscious of it and just feel done with it. Well, that could be my motivation to get this done and printed. So I can truly be complete with this manuscript.

I finished up a round of books that are all deep with social commentary in the message of the story. They were great stories with such meaning and touch on dark spots on our human experience.

When I got the end I reflected on my own stories I’ve written and they seem shallow. Yet the deep, dark sides of humanity seem constantly in our faces with the news, conversations, and tragic events that happen all around us so why do I feel bad for wanting to bring joy, laughter, and light into the world with my creative works?

Do I want to take my religious/political/world view and bare it to the world by burying down into the storyline and make the reader’s question just what is happening in the world? Is that my purpose? Do I want that to be my purpose?

To be a writer, I want to be very clear about why I AM writing. Is it to entertain? To lighten another human’s burdens even for the brief time they read my words? Or do I want to comment on social woes and strive to make changes?

In the end, I don’t think it matter why I write. Maybe I’m just being too heady about this all and I should just write what I want to write and let the rest sort itself out later after I’m done with the piece. For now, I guess I will be content and get the story out of me and let the rest just be and not worry to deeply about it.